Testing guidance systems for missiles has had limitations with respect to the data collected and was costly. An IMU positioned on a missile would operate from take-off of the missile and would guide the missile to a destination of impact. The IMU and the missile were destroyed by the impact landing. The IMU was programmed to deliver its payload of the missile and would be tracked by GPS, radar or other down range optical devices. The resulting destruction of the missile and IMU equipment would be costly and the true end to end data collection of that particular flight would not be reliably obtained.
Pods carrying IMU equipment for testing have been proposed and would be mounted to high performance aircraft for testing strategic-grade IMU's that could be used for guidance for a land based intercontinental ballistic missile (“ICBM”). The high performance aircraft could be used to attain high “g” forces that would be experienced in the flight of, for example, an ICBM. This testing of the IMU was an improvement over testing of the IMU secured to an actual missile that went through a flight and resulted in the missile coming down and impacting the ground at the end of its flight. However, a shortcoming of this testing approach of the aircraft carrying the IMU equipment is that the aircraft had to eventually return to its home base or a new landing airfield for refueling and post flight accuracy assessment. Thus, IMU's of these pods would not be able to experience a full end-to-end visual flight wherein the IMU would not land, for example, at a location on the ground to simulate, validate and demonstrate overall IMU full flight performance of that of, for example, an ICBM.